The Paris subway attack, a hoax? Definitely yes. She confesses (see update)

Yesterday morning I wrote about how a young woman, now identified as Marie-Léonie, was mugged while riding the Paris Metro with her 13-month old baby and no one came to her aid. It was an anti-semitic incident, since, even when the woman is not Jewish, her assailants thought she was. The incident has generated a huge outcry in France and abroad.

Later in the day I was watching the 7 PM France2 news and there’s a possibility the woman lied. AP has a story Report of Anti-Semitic Paris Attack Probed. Here’s an article in Le Figaro, in French.

These are the details: Because of the tremendous outcry (this has been the top story for 2 days in a row), there’s a full investigation going on with over 2 dozen investigators.

The cops have looked at all videos from the stations’ cameras and, for instance, there’s no trace of any men running out of Sarcelles station.

She said she had talked to a train employee after the attack but none of the employees remember her.

Marie-Léonie claims she was helped by an elderly couple after she left the station, but no such couple has surfaced. Apparently there are no other witnesses, either. (It wouldn’t surprise me if there were witnesses and none came forward. In France, not assisting a person in danger is a crime punishable with a maximum of 5 years in prison and a fine of 75,000 euros — nearly $100,000. However, Chirac has stated that any witnesses coming forward in this case would not be liable).

What’s really casting doubt on the woman’s testimony is that she had filed 6 complaints at Versailles Police station re: sexual attacks over the past year or so but there’s been a total lack of evidence on those, so the poor woman might have serious psychiatric problems. (But I wonder, IF she did the damage herself, on the other hand, would there be video of her leaving the station in a bad condition?).

This morning another France 2 article, Agression du RER: interrogations, states that a 28 yr old man saw the young woman at the Louvre station wearing torn slacks.

Jonathan from ¡No Pasarán!, who lives in Paris and has been listening to the news in France-Info radio and LCI TV, however, says “The woman’s story should be subject to scrutiny; however I can find no reason, as of yet, to discount her story based on the reasons emphasized by France-Info and LCI”.

But back to the France2 article. The same France2 article says that another person who knows Marie-Léonie has stated that M-L made up the story after hearing that a Jewish man was mugged the prior weekend. The man had to be hospitalized.

In spite of the possibility of the woman having made up the story, the politicians interviewed appear to point in a positive direction: that the country needs to face up to the fact that there’s an atmosphere of violence, and of indifference. As one man put it, “there’s been 30 other attacks, what about those?”. Just yesterday Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin stated “Anti-Semitism is shameful … but there is also a sickness in our society,” “It’s indifference to violence.” As if anti-Semitism wasn’t a sickness.

The worst thing about watching the France2 news is that, after the Sarcelles school burning, the Lyons buses burned, the hundreds of temples vandalized, the graves vandalized with swastikas, week after week, there’s never any arrests. Hundreds of antisemitic incidents, and for all the years I’ve been watching the news, not one arrest has been shown in the news. One can only hope that this particular incident makes people wake up.

Update French woman admits to police she made up anti-Semitic attack; RER D : selon la police, la jeune femme avoue avoir menti. Even when I regard her as clearly mentally disturbed, I am infinitely angry that she lied.